In April 1869, Louis Bouchereau completed the first of his annual reports of the sugar and rice crops in Louisiana. Serving as editor of the Louisiana Sugar Report and the annual Statement of sugar and rice production for nine years, Louis Bouchereau died in 1878. Despite the "unremitting labor" of compiling his report, Bouchereau remained wholly committed to "the value of carefully collected results of individual experience." As Bouchereau exhorted in his 1877, when faced with competition by a rival and cheaper sugar report, he possessed "intimacy with the subject" and lengthy experience in the industry. "I have traversed nearly all the Parishes," Bouchereau exclaimed, "stood face to face with producers in their fields and homes. On the spot I have revised my tables, and made doubly safe the figures on which my work stands." A year later, Louis Bouchereau expired, but even in his dying days, the elderly sugar reporter-a self proclaimed "pioneer of sugar statistics"-was in the fields, recording the crop data with earnest accuracy. With his father's health declining, Alcee Bouchereau assumed the mantle as the state's pre-eminent agricultural journalist, filing his first report in 1877. For the next forty years, Alcee Bouchereau recorded the annual crop returns with increasing detail; he expanded upon his father's reports, adding pages of reports and correspondence that enabled planters to keep abreast of the latest innovations, both in cultivation and manufacturing. Added to these pages, Bouchereau included his statistical and tabular records of sugar production and provided detailed sections on the tariff and the disparate sugar, molasses, and rice markets.

Traversing the sugar country for five months a year on horseback and by skiff, Alcee warned his readership that he lacked "that perfect confidence in himself and his work" that so "signally characterized" his father, but that he strove to stay abreast of every producer's output and report it with accuracy and reliability. Like his father and Champomier before him, Alcee Bouchereau never tired of underscoring the labor and expense of producing the annual report to his readership. Not only did the sugar reporters spend months away from home as they traversed the state to record the harvest data but they placed themselves in so small danger (they frequently complained of flooding, cold, and exposure). The personal effort required to complete the report was indeed considerable but the annual statement nevertheless served as the principal authority on the sugar industry and sugar trade for planters and merchants alike. As Bouchereau announced in 1903, "we give in our statistical tables the details in facts and figures. They speak for themselves, and tell the story of Louisiana's sugar industry." Extending his commentary still further, Bouchereau added that his latest report gave to the public "the fullest, most complete and interesting sugar statistics ever offered to our readers" and that despite years of commenting on the industry, he had "never failed to point out the true facts connected with the crop under review . . . At times it has been a disagreeable duty to record shrinkages, unfavorable developments, and the like," he concluded, but "we have never hesitated to lay bare the conclusions demanded by the statistics."

Over the course of a half century of crop reporting, the Bouchereaus had overseen an industry that had undergone profound changes, both in scale and scope. Born in 1826, Louis Bouchereau watched over the growth of the antebellum sugar industry during the 1850s and, like most Louisianans, he celebrated the bumper 1861 sugar crop of 230,000 tons. By the time he filed his first report, however, the Louisiana sugar industry had been decimated by four years of Civil War. Of the 2400 sugar producers in the state on the eve of war, less than 200 farms still cultivated cane in 1864; production had crashed from the pre-war highs to just 5000 tons in 1864 and the value of the sugar industry had fallen from $200,000,000 in 1861 to no more than $30,000,000 in 1865. The industry staged a modest recovery in the years immediately following the war, but Bouchereau's first report bemoaned an industry in disarray and facing a critical short-fall in labor. As the New Orleanian remarked, less than 40 percent of the formerly enslaved pre Civil War work-force toiled in the cane fields under free labor and "many fine plantations" are "now lying waste and idle for the want of the labor to work them." The 673 sugar houses operating in 1868 produced just thirty percent of the peak antebellum yield; it was a sizeable improvement over the the crops of 1865-67 but nonetheless reflected an industry in deep turmoil. Fifty years later, however, Alcee Bouchereau reported on a wholly transformed industry; just 167 estates still produced sugar but they yielded almost 600,000,000 pounds of sugar, a six fold increase from the dismal returns of the post-war years. To be sure, the 1916 crop proved smaller than preceding crops, but wartime demand and the dislocations of war-torn Europe ensured that "for the first time," the United States was one "of the big sugar exporting nations."

While the scale of the industry altered from the 1870s to 1910s, the way by which sugar was produced changed too. In the years following the Civil War, planters continued to produce sugar, much as they had done a decade earlier, namely evaporating the sugar juice in open kettles until it was thick and grainy enough to be "struck" and transported to coolers where it would granulate and the remaining molasses would drain out; this would leave (relatively dry) brown sugar. Although some estates possessed vacuum and evaporating pans by which one could produce a higher grade (and whiter sugar), even in 1868, 85 percent of sugar plantations maintained open kettles. Much as under slave labor too, each estate possessed its own sugar mill, but this pattern would change from 1880 to 1920. Increased global production of sugar, reduced commodity prices, shortages of capital, and high labor costs prompted a wave of business mergers and the modernization of cultivation and production methods. To combat these allied difficulties, yet also expand the cane acreage, planters and smaller scale farmers established a centralized factory system where cultivators raised cane and sold it to larger central factories for manufacturing into sugar. The adoption of the central factory system triggered business consolidation and the replacement of the estate-based production with centralized manufacturing and refining. In 1870, therefore, some 1100 sugar estates produced just over 150,000 lbs of sugar per estate; by 1916, however, some 167 sugar houses each produced 3.6 million lbs of sugar. Whereas those 1100 sugar planters cultivated and ground their canes with their own milling and processing facilities in 1870, the 167 sugar houses in 1916 ground the collective output of 1500 farmers who grew cane on their land and who sold it to the centrals. A number of large cane growers continued to dominate cultivation in the early twentieth century, but an increasingly sizeable group of white and black tenants, and small cane farmers now cultivated the soils that fifty years previously had been the preserve of rich slaveholders and post-war landlords. The number of actual farms raising cane thus remained relatively stable from the immediate post-bellum years to the twentieth century, but the industry became socially more heterogeneous and there was a marked concentration in the actual processing and manufacturing of sugar, with a corresponding rise in output per manufacturing facility.

As Alcee Bouchereau observed in 1894,"concentration, improved machinery, greater extraction are the watchwords and rallying cries of the sugar planter. Gradually the cultivation of cane and manufacture of sugar from it are becoming separate and distinct industries. Men of means invest their capital in equipping first-class factories furnished with all the modern improvements that the genius of invention has produced; small planters pursue the cultivation on the general lines, and intensive farming and intensive manufacturing are taking the place of former loose methods in vogue. More sugar is now produced per acre than ever before. The price of cane has risen in proportion and competition between the various factories will have a tendency to even augment present prices. The planter on the higher price per ton shares with the manufacturer the advantages gained by modern improved machinery." Bouchereau's observations proved prescient for the sugar industry underwent still further concentration in the following twenty years as manufacturers quit the industry when faced by intense international competition. The industry that Bouchereau described in 1894, however, was profoundly different to that described by his predecessor in the late 1860s; the nature of sugar production had altered, the composition of those who either owned or rented the soils had likewise changed, and the industry faced even greater international and domestic competition. Only the ever trenchant commitment to black labor remained a constant, though even on the key question of work crews, cane farmers had experimented with Chinese, German, and Italian laborers. Having tested and found them wanting, planters redoubled their commitment to African American labor and their belief that sugar work and racial control advanced in tandem.

The sugar industry accordingly underwent profound changes during the second half of the nineteenth century but the logic of data collection and publication remained as compelling to these chroniclers as it had to P.A. Champomier before the Civil War. As Louis Bouchereau observed in 1871, "the value of the carefully collected results of individual experience" was priceless for "the greatness and importance of the interests involved in the most important agricultural products of our State." In keeping with this logic, the statistical tables published in the sugar reports expanded from their pre-war format and continued to grow in complexity through the nineteenth century. Building upon P.A. Champomier's work, Louis Bouchereau included a substantially more detailed analysis of the prevailing apparatus in the sugar houses, he added a section indicating the building materials used in the sugar house, he inserted the product of each estate, sugar molasses, rice, and corn (in barrels, gallons, hogsheads, and pounds), and noted the former occupants of each landholding. He further systematized Champomier's relatively eclectic recording of plantation names and added further clarity on the location of each estate, notably by recording the nearest post-office and noting more exact river and bayous locations. The enormity of the data collection task and the need to produce an affordable volume ultimately forced a modest reduction in the number of statistical fields included, but through the 1870s and 1880s, Bouchereau continued to report the sugar crop in hogsheads and continued to list rice production per estate (in pounds).

To no small degree, Louis and most particularly Alcee Bouchereau were products of the modernizing and scientific ethos of the early New South. Like boosters elsewhere in the South, Bouchereau was a devout convert to the cult of economic progress and modernization in the post-war South. The New South creed focused predomintaly on mining and manufacturing in the region, but an agrarian variant of it emerged in the Louisiana sugar industry. The most heavily capitalized of the Southern plantation crops, Louisiana's sugar planters had long been at the vanguard in mechanizing the manufacture of sugar (notably with steam-powered mills). A decade after the Civil War and with the industry beginning to recover to levels reminiscent of the 1840s, Louisiana's sugar elite began once again to invest in new machinery and turn to the logic of scientific improvement and regional progress. The Louisiana Sugar Planters Association (LSPA) was founded in November 1877 as an industry-wide organization to promote the state's sugar interests, Above all, the LSPA sought to secure a stable work force for the planters, but it also encouraged the use of science and technology in the manufacturing of sugar, and called for the federal protection of the domestic U.S. sugar industry. The compulsion to rely on scientifically proven research and technology profoundly changed the sugar industry in Louisiana as planters increasingly converted to the compelling logic of science and with it, the veracity of scientifically-based data. The creation of the Audubon Sugar School in 1891 and agricultural experimentation stations accelerated the scientific revolution at work in the sugar houses and on the pages of Bouchereau's annual reports where exact and precise data was tabulated and prepared for cross-referencing and analysis. By 1890, Bouchereau had wholly dispensed with (indefinite) hogsheads for measurement and reported output in the infinitely more precise measure of total pounds per estate; the same year, he also withdrew from listing rice production. By the early 1890s, Bouchereau replaced the slow and lengthy water route distance to New Orleans with direct railroad mileage. The Southern Pacific, The Texas and Pacific, and the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroads, in particular, now served as the principal conduits for the sugar trade as the iron horse finally trumped a century of transporting the crop via the rivers and bayous of the state. In 1895, Bouchereau also shifted symbolically from naming planters (as the principal occupants of landholdings) to the cane grower and sugar manufacturer; it was a typographic alteration but one that underscored the change in the locus of production. No longer would individual cane planters dominate the industry, rather manufacturing companies and smaller cane growers (who sold their canes to technologically advanced central mills) came to the fore, both in the industry and in the crop reports.

Although the exact tabular nature of the reports did not alter from the 1890s to the 1910s, the sugar reports (much like the LSPA) became increasingly devoted to key trade and manufacturing information on the sugar industry. Indeed, by 1900, the Bouchereau reports featured well over one hundred and thirty-five pages of valuable trade detail and dozens of commercial adverts that swamped in terms of print (and pages) the actual sugar reports themselves. That year, Alcee Bouchereau also included indexes of cane growers and manufacturers, plantations, and post offices. He reprinted the U.S. Department of Agriculture's weather bulletins for Louisiana, noted daily precipitation levels at almost thirty weather stations in the sugar country, and recorded maximum and minimum temperatures within the state. Attempting to extract a level of precision in the Gulf South's famously unreliable climate for cane sugar cultivation, these detailed reports gave planters a measure of scientific evidence to explain their crop successes (or failures) and meteorological facts by which cultivators might plan the following crop year. Allied to the weather reports lay a weekly review of the sugar and molasses market in New Orleans, tables recording sugar prices (by quality of product) in New Orleans, New York, London and Hamburg and lists of the sales and stocks of sugar and molasses held in various cities. The scale of sugar imports and exports to the U.S. received substantial attention as did the growing and ever expanding (and threatening) beet sugar industry. In short, Bouchereau's report provided a mini trade compendium; to be sure, the scale and volume of trade data was far less sophisticated than that enjoyed by trade houses, but it nonetheless provided the subscriber to the Louisiana Sugar Reports with statistics that enabled him to make shrewder marketing decisions than previously. The ordered tables in the reports, moreover, offered the reader evidentiary proof and sustained the LSPA's call for technological, agrnomic, and chemical research into cane cultivation and sugar manufacture.

By the turn of the century, the need for making astute business and marketing choices was fast becoming a matter of life and death for Louisiana planters. The rise of domestically produced beet sugar from the 1880s, the inclusion of duty-free Hawaiian sugar, the Wilson-Gorman Tariff (which repealed the bounty of 2 cents per pound paid by the U.S. government to domestic sugar producers), and the incorporation of Puerto Rican and Philippine sugar (at discount tariff rates) placed the Louisiana sugar industry under serious threat. The competitive advantage enjoyed by Louisiana producers (guaranteed by the U.S. tariff and the state's relatively isolated position as the nation's premier sugar producer) gave way over the course of twenty years. The actual volume of sugar produced by Louisiana planters continued to rise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it did so against a backdrop of an increasingly competitive marketplace where Louisiana's producers enjoyed a dwindling share of the national market. The First World War, and the maintenance of the wartime duty on sugar imports, helped the ailing industry but the vast trade details reported in the Bouchereau reports bespoke an industry in alarm. The detailed pages of information helped planters and manufacturers compete in a world sugar market that was larger and more complex than anything their predecessors had faced and one where the position of the U.S. government was not nearly as steadfast in its protection of Louisiana's cane industry. To be sure, their slaveholding and post-war predecessors had certainly faced competition from Cuba and had struggled to maintain tariff protection of the industry, but these experiences found no comparison with the competitive nature of sugar production in the twentieth century.

The last of Champomier's antebellum reports were published in an era of exceptional confidence. True, the storm clouds of civil war loomed on the horizon but the antebellum industry was at its peak in 1861. Slavery would thankfully be abolished by 1865 but slave emancipation ultimately left an industry, that had been wholly reliant on institutionalized slavery, in ruins. Abolition, moreover, literally eradicated tens of millions of dollars of slave property from the portfolios of the state's richest planters. In 1860 alone, the value of slave property in Louisiana's sugar belt outstripped the entire value of all manufacturing products assembled in Illinois in 1860. Louisiana's sugar producing slaves were simply worth a small fortune, slightly less infact than the combined personal property of all people in Maine or Michigan, for example, at the eve of the war. The economic turmoil unleashed by emancipation was thus vast and this its-self did not include the devaluation of land values in the aftermath of the war; Louisiana's sugar belt simply crashed from being one of the richest and most expensive tracts of antebellum realty to an economic backwater within five years. Ascension Parish in the heart of Louisiana's sugar producing belt featured more than $13 million of real estate and personal property in 1860, a decade later, the assessed value of real and personal property was less than $2 million; this pattern was repeated throughout the sugar country where civil war and slave emancipation dealt a thunderous blow to the slaveholding classes. It was a massive economic dislocation and one with far ranging consequences for the regional economy, most notably in the absence of capital. Louis Bouchereau's reports detailed an industry in profound flux; one that lacked labor and capital until the late 1870s. The sugar reports attempted to bring precision and accuracy over the condition of the industry and they detailed the latest technological innovations, but the reports that Alcee Bouchereau compiled were themselves drawn up against an increasingly gloomy back drop. Rising labor costs, increased global competition, declining prices, costly technology, and uncertain tariff protection would drive many from the industry by the turn of the century. Louisiana production would continue throughout the twentieth century, but the tabular reports in Bouchereau's final statements and the ardent cries of the LSPA spoke of an industry struggling to survive in an era of intense global competition.

Richard Follett

Sources: L. Bouchereau, Statement of the Sugar and Rice Crops Made in Louisiana in 1868-69 (New Orleans: Young, Bright & Co., 1869), viii; L. Bouchereau, Louisiana Sugar Report, 1871-72 (New Orleans: Pelican Book and Job Printing Office, 1872), vi; L. Bouchereau, Statement of the Sugar and Rice Crops Made in Louisiana in 1876-77 (New Orleans: Pelican Book and Job Printing Office, 1877), vii; L. Bouchereau, Statement of the Sugar and Rice Crops Made in Louisiana in 1875-76 (New Orleans: Pelican Book and Job Printing Office, 1876), vi; A. Bouchereau, Statement of the Sugar and Rice Crops Made in Louisiana in 1878-79 (New Orleans: Pelican Steam Book and Job Printing Office, 1879), viii; A. Bouchereau, Statement of the Sugar and Rice Crops Made in Louisiana in 1902-03 (New Orleans: Pelican Steam Book and Job Printing Office, 1904), i A. Bouchereau, Statement of the Sugar and Rice Crops Made in Louisiana in 1916-17 (New Orleans: Young, Bright & Co., 1917), i; A. Bouchereau, Statement of the Sugar and Rice Crops Made in Louisiana in 1893-94 (New Orleans: Young, Bright & Co., 1894), i; Historical Census Browser. Retrieved [accessed 5-4-08] from the University of Virginia, Geospatial and Statistical Data Center: http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html. Also see, Richard Follett and Rick Halpern, "From Slavery to Freedom in Louisiana's Sugar Country: Changing Labour Systems and Workers' Power," in Bernard Moitt, ed., Sugar, Slavery, and Society (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2004), 135-156; John C. Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana's Sugar Parishes, 1862-1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2001): Moon Ho-Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); John Alfred Heitmann, The Modernization of the Louisiana Sugar Industry, 1830-1910 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); J. Carlyle Sitterson, Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753-1950 (Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1953).